Lo desconocido: La máquina del tiempo cósmica

Half of it was interesting science and tech and beautiful imagery, the other half feelgoody blather about personal details and mini-bios of people involved.

The early development and various designs was glossed over by a guy petting his dog going through wrinkled papers on the dining-room table. Should have been more about why it uses infrared light and red-shifting of distant galaxies, why the Arianespace base in in south america. And so on.

The worst parts were the segments with the airheaded valley girl types on the phone screens jumping up and down saying "Ohmygod" "yay" etc. Gag me.........

What an inspiration to us all the accomplishment that can be made when everyone has one goal! The pictures are absolutely beautiful and the thought and visuals of what is really out there is amazing. Without us seeing behind the scenes and all the work that went into it we would just take it for granted. Thank goodness for this film for showing us all what we really don't know behind the scenes. We just get to see the pictures from online but this film was detailed in showing us the hardworking people and the nervousness that goes into everything before the rest of us gets to see it.

There was only one character/astrophysicist that was really. Too much gibberish for me I fast forward her parts. I want to know the educational and the story and people behind the scenes.

"Light in A Dark Time", a quote from a female astrophysicist on the show, is the best way to describe the James Webb telescope. The short documentary is definitely worth watching as it showcases the difficulty in designing, leading, getting funding, the disappointments and all hurdles that had to be overcome to be able to have the very risky and near impossible successful launch. Now that it is launched, humanity can see back in time 13 1/2 billion years ago, and the first image shared showed a massive amount of galaxies that old. I didn't give it a 10 star rating because quite honestly, if you are not an astrophysicist, and just a normal average citizen, it is extremely hard to wrap your mind around it (the shear time and distance of it) and hard to actually understand how truly awesome it is. Even by the awe on the astrophysicist's faces who do understand the meaning the Time Machine concept and distance, it is so amazing for them to comprehend it all as well at first look. Am sure it is just a first look at what is to come with more discoveries as scientists study the images.

This documentary spent over 1 hour talking about the things that could have gone wrong about the launch of the greatest and most complicated space research project ever. Such shame. JWST is the most amazing and complex piece of engineering we ever produced and successfully launched into space. Yes, lots of things could have gone wrong, but they didn't. Unknown: The Cosmic Time Machine won't spend any time highlighting the astonishing, breakthrough technology and science that went into the making of JWST. You won't learn much about the stunning pictures it takes, why we needed it to begin with. Nothing is said about the main point of this project; how seeing the images from the beginning of time help us understand who we are, and perhaps, why we are here.

As "Unknown: Cosmic Time Machine" (2023 release; 64 min.) opens, it is "13.8 Billion Years Ago" as the voice-over reminds us that is when the Big Bang occurred. We then go to "December 25, 2021" and the countdown for the launch of the James Web Space Telescope is on... Just before takeoff, we go back i1990 when the Hubble Space Telescope launched. At this point we are less than 10 minutes into the documentary.

Couple of comments: this documentary does a great job explaining some of te background as to what it is the James Webb Space Telescope actually does which its predecessor didn't do. Much attention is given to the 344 "single-point failures" which the 10,000 men and women who worked on the Webb for several decades, must avoid, an almost Herculean challenge. The big pay-off comes in the last 10-15 minutes when we get the spectacular photos which the Webb is now collecting, along with a treasure-trove of related data. One of the photo's shows a galaxy "being born" 13.2 billion years ago (yes, not all that long after the big bang). It also made me think how planet Earth has been fundamentally ravaged with in just the last 250 years or so (since the Industrial Revolution). This does not bode well for the future of humankind...Meanwhile, enjoy this every entertaining AND educational documentary. Can be viewed by anyone from ages 7 to 77.

"Unknown: Cosmic Time Machine" started streaming on Netflix a few days ago. If you have any interest in space or in human explorations, I'd readily suggest you check this out, and draw your own conclusion.